


the perfect places

by mytea



Category: DCU (Comics)
Genre: Drug Use, M/M, PTSD, oops i forgot to warn for
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-27
Updated: 2016-08-27
Packaged: 2018-08-11 10:21:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,022
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7887502
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mytea/pseuds/mytea
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>One year in brief review.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the perfect places

**Author's Note:**

> I started this over half a year ago! And finished it! And have been working on little details and staring at it wasting time for no reason! So, I'm just calling it. I don't like it anymore.

Bruce has had nightmares for as long as he can remember. They are regular, persistent, and there is no medication or comfort that can quell them. Hal learns this on the day after Halloween, because it is the first time Bruce falls asleep in his apartment. He is awoken by frantic breaths and fists clutching his shirt and when he tries to shake Bruce awake, he gets a black eye and a busted lip for his trouble.

Bruce stops talking to him, predictably. After three weeks of silence, Hal snaps and ambushes Bruce at the Watchtower. He pushes him and grabs him and yells. He asks him where the fuck does he get off and who does he think he is. He gets in his face, but Batman is Batman, through and through, stoic and still until Hal runs out of anger. Until Hal presses their foreheads together and says they’ll figure it out, they’ll try again, just please, it’s worth it, you’re worth it, just stay. His eyes are shut tight. He doesn’t stop pleading until he feels Bruce’s lips against his.

It is New Year’s Eve before Bruce lets himself sleep next to Hal again. They are in the manor this time, and Hal stirs when Bruce kicks him hard in the shin.

Hal knows that if he tries to wake Bruce, he’ll lash out again. Knows that Bruce won’t be able to handle hurting him a second time. But he hates sitting here, seeing Bruce has gone somewhere that he can’t go, is fighting a battle he can’t fight alongside him.  

He looks at him and doesn’t know what to do. He sits on his side of the bed with his face in his hands, watching dawn creep under the curtains, and thinks that if he were Clark, if he were Diana, he’d be able to do something. Anything.

Bruce stares at the new bruise on Hal’s leg the next morning and doesn’t meet his eyes until dinner.

Even so, when Hal calls, Bruce answers, and when Bruce texts, Hal texts back. They both think they’re the ones being selfish, but they can’t help themselves. It is a weakness that eats at them, halfway pleasant.

Their schedules do not often allow them to spend entire nights together. When they do, it isn’t always that Bruce will attack him in his sleep. But it is often enough that Hal has learned not to touch Bruce when the other man can’t see it coming. Often enough that Bruce has woken up too many times to find Hal has moved to the couch.

On the night of Bruce’s birthday, it has somehow been five months. Hal presses a box into Bruce’s hands.

“I got you something,” he announces, even though they’d already exchanged gifts. They are dressed down to their underwear and socks, and Hal is wiggling his toes against Bruce’s ankles. Bruce opens the present slowly like maybe there are poisonous spiders inside.

“You bought me marijuana,” Bruce says, with nearly no inflection. He doesn’t sound incredulous. Doesn’t say, “My god, you have to be the worst superhero I’ve ever met,” but Hal can hear it. He laughs into Bruce’s neck and reminds him that Nightwing’s got Superman on speed-dial.

They smoke and they kiss until their chests feel as fuzzy as their socks. When midnight has long past, Bruce exhales a happy birthday into Hal’s lungs and drifts.

Hal wakes to the sun in his eyes and Bruce warm and heavy against him. He’s starving, but he doesn’t move. He wishes they could do this again but knows that they can’t. He studies Bruce’s face until he can’t keep his eyes open and eventually goes back to sleep. 

Hal soon learns from Alfred that Bruce’s nightmares get worse when he is around. He doesn’t say as much, of course. He is curt and proper and kind, simply mentioning, when Hal brings it up, that the recent increase in their frequency just happens to coincide with the abrupt beginning of their relationship. Hal doesn’t question how Alfred knows. Doesn’t doubt that he does.  

Hal finishes his breakfast, thanks Alfred, and goes upstairs to call out a goodbye to Bruce, who is in the shower. He collects his ring and his phone and flies across the country, hidden above the clouds.

When he gets home, he punches his fist through the drywall. The rest of the day is spent factoring the repairs into his budget and imagining shapes in the water stains on the ceiling.

Hal stops calling Bruce because it’s easier not to. Days slip past, and Bruce’s attempts to contact him get fewer and farther between. On the first day of April, Hal is leaving on a mission to Talkor and Batman is standing at the monitors, pretending not to watch him. Hal turns him around and kisses him desperately before he goes, not saying much or even knowing why. He wonders if Bruce will forgive him.  

Hal spends his time in space determinedly focused on work and not much else. But when he lies down to sleep on his short breaks, he can only think about how much he hates his mattress and the empty space beside him.

He gets back two days after Mother’s Day. It’s shit timing for both of them and he knows it, so he holds off for as long as he can—eight hours and twelve minutes, to be exact—before crawling into Bruce’s bed. He’d killed that time napping and getting reacquainted with his liquor cabinet, so he’s drunk when he plasters himself to Bruce’s back, clumsy and hot.  Bruce turns his head.

Hal speaks up before he can say anything. “Tomorrow?” he slurs, burrowing into the Bruce’s neck. “Can we do it tomorrow?”

They do it tomorrow. And the next day, for that matter. It’s the worst kind of argument, one that stalls and sleeps and rears its head between fragile truces and angry sex.

“My intimacy issues?” Bruce is yelling at him, on the fourth day. “As though your inability to commit didn’t have anything to do with you running off to _space_?”

“That wasn’t. I… I thought it would be better.” Bruce is great at putting him on the defensive, and it pisses him off. “I was doing that for you. And my job, by the way. If you can’t handle—“

“Don’t presume what I can handle. If _you_ want to leave, then leave.”

“Bruce, come on. I apologized, didn’t I? I don’t. I don’t want to.”

“Fine.”

“Like ever.” He says it in emphasis. It’s almost a joke, said with the cadence of one. It isn’t though.

Bruce is quiet for a long time. “Good,” he says. It’s so soft Hal almost doesn’t hear it. If Hal didn’t know what they were doing before, he sure as hell doesn’t know now.

He gets used to the idea that Bruce has to get used to him. He swallows his pride until he thinks he’s going to choke on it and gives it time that neither of them dare to hope they have. They move on.

But bad nights become predictable. On the anniversary of Bruce’s parent’s deaths, he wakes to find that Bruce has piled pillows in between them, and it’s so cute he’s only a little bit sad. It seems to Hal in that moment that the sight of Bruce curled up in blankets, a hand reaching through seven pillows towards him, is at least his third favorite thing to wake up to.

Hal goes with him to the cemetery that day, and Bruce goes with him to his brother’s house on Father’s Day soon after. Bruce says, “This is Hal,” and Hal says, “This is Bruce.” Hal doesn’t call him his boyfriend because Bruce doesn’t, but the introductions are so easy and familiar that Hal’s heart skips a beat each time.

They don’t really move in together. They can’t, and Hal can list a million reasons why. But more and more often, Hal will follow Bruce home from the Watchtower. He starts sleeping in Bruce’s bed while Bruce is still on patrol and commuting in the early morning before Bruce is awake. He’s grown accustomed to the way Bruce sleeps, his tossing and turning and sudden waking. He’ll tell Bruce this, and Bruce will say he’s gotten used to his snoring and his cold feet. Hal will wonder if he means that two ways.

Sometimes he still wakes up. Sometimes he watches Bruce struggle, trying to know when to turn the lights on and when to turn away and hope Bruce won’t remember anything he saw. Sometimes he wanders the halls of Wayne Manor, history and responsibility weighing down on him with the heavy shadows. Sometimes he just goes back to sleep. He likes best, selfishly, the nights when he’s not alone. When Bruce wakes up, and Hal gets to hold him and kiss his cheeks as though he’s spilled tears only he can see.

They have one of these nights after Jason’s birthday. Hal thinks he gets a good minute—a record high—before Bruce is shoving him away and locking himself in the bathroom. Hal isn’t surprised, although the day had gone well enough. Jason had returned Bruce’s call, thanked him for the new boots that had appeared in his apartment, and indulged Bruce in stilted conversation. They’d expertly sidestepped the fact that Jason’s bathroom had been retiled and his security upgraded, which meant Jason had already yelled about it to Dick, Tim, and probably Barbara. Regardless, he didn’t bring it up to Bruce, so they hung up on relatively good terms.

It had gone better than Tim’s birthday, if Hal was being honest. When Tim had woken up to find himself and his _boyfriend_ on a new mattress, wearing exactly what they had gone to sleep wearing (i.e. nothing), no amount of Alfred’s food in the fridge could derail him. To be fair, the old bed had been awful, and Tim had been complaining about it for months. Hal thought the whole thing was pretty sweet, actually, but he could admit that he was biased. He’ll never tell any of Bruce’s kids just how involved he was in that operation.

He loves when Bruce lets him be a part of that life, just like he loves when Bruce lets him be a part of his past. He’s come to love it even when it’s hardest, when he’s sitting with his back against the bathroom door, singing stupid songs into the silence and grazing Bruce’s fingers through the crack under the door.

This is just the way things are, and things are good.    

Eventually, September is nearly through, and it is officially one year since they’d awkwardly made out in the cockpit of the Javelin. It feels like a regular day, complete with one or two near death experiences and Alfred’s blackberry scones. After saving the planet from certain destruction, Hal needles Damian about Halloween costumes and Bruce does paperwork in the study, and when they’re falling asleep next to each other, all Hal can think is, “we made it.” The two of them might last the year, maybe even the next.

He’s happy.

He’s panicking.

He can’t help but remember Carol, once his on-again off-again constant. That had been love, he thinks. A different love, surely, and it hadn’t gone well. But it feels strange, to know that part of his life is over. Strange to think back on nights in pubs on Earth and off, ones that ended in all sorts of beds that he never really slept in. He’d never been one to do it right, like this. To be attached. If he’d done that to Carol...  

His brooding is interrupted when Bruce tosses his arm out and catches him in the stomach. Hal stays still, choking and laughing while Bruce rolls again and tucks himself against his chest. Fuck, he thinks, grinning as Bruce settles, heavy like a panther pinning him. Fuck.

It isn’t hard to forget about other flings and other beds.

He’s never slept so well, or so easy.

**Author's Note:**

> I used the 1976 DC calendar for the dates of their birthdays and Bruce's parent's murder. Got Tim and Jason's off of some googling, but yeah I know all this stuff is contested so I kept it a little vague. And yes, I also skipped all religious holidays to keep that vagueness. If you are wondering why there aren't 5 other batkid birthdays it is because then it would be overloaded with birthdays, and I think Hal wouldn't be involved in the beginning in birthday stuff.  
> Title is from an ee cummings poem cause I'm a tool.


End file.
